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There are many cases where English uses capital letters (e.g. January) but Spanish uses lowercase (e.g. enero). Grammar or orthography books have long lists of all the cases where capital letters are used. But I thought it would be useful to see a comparison between capitalization rules in English and Spanish?

What are the cases where English uses capital letters but Spanish uses lowercase (e.g. months, days of the week)? I assume it is a relatively short list.

though it's correct just point out that the ordinals after the names are 99% of times written like: "Luis XIV" instead of "Luis catorce"
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JuanilloFeb 13 '12 at 18:52

I might have chosen “el río Guadalquivir” instead of Mount Rainier for an example. And those aren’t exactly pure toponyms. It’s when it has a geographic feature attached to it, like “el mar Mediterráneo”, where the name itself is a proper name and thus capitalized, but the geologic feature is not.
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tchristFeb 19 '12 at 16:15

In Spanish, titles have the same rules as ordinary language, capitalizing only the first word with the exception of proper names that always are capitalized, while English capitalizes every word except prepositions and articles (unless the final word that always is capitalized no matter what morphological case.)

His favorite play is A Midsummer Night’s Dream. (Su obra favorita es El sueño de una noche de verano.)

+1 for the answer, I think the uses in dates, languages and nationalities are the most common in which you can see this difference. However, titles in books, magazines or printed works in general are a different thing. For example, a publication might have its own styling guidelines and require capital letters in titles of chapters, but not sections. When used consistently, it is not necessarily harmless or really disrespectful of the rules.
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JanomaFeb 7 '12 at 20:34

Thanks. Concerning the titles in books, with the exception of the cover when there may be a design constrain, there is actually a rule for capitalize only the 1st letter (except when the capital is required besides the fact is a title.) «Uso de las mayúsculas». Nueva ortografía de la lengua española, 2010. p.6. <tinyurl.com/yld76om&gt;
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pferorAug 22 '12 at 19:30